Aces High

"Ca

The android jammed two alloy fingers into a light socket. There was a flash of light, the smell of ozone. "This works better," he said.

"They go

"I've given my creator's terms to General Carter. There's been no reply yet. I think the command structure is in disarray."

"Yeah. Tell me about it."

"Wait," said the android. Behind the crashing of the guns, the roar of jets, he began to hear another sound. The crackle oЂ small-arms fire.

A Marine officer raced into the restaurant, his hand holding his helmet. "It's started," he said. The android began ru

Mistral looked up at the officer with streaming eyes. She looked a lot younger than seventeen.

"I'm ready," she said.

The Swarm was stopped on the outskirts of Philadelphia. The two Marine regiments held, their strongpoints surrounded by walls of Swarm dead. The victory was made possible thanks to support from Air Force and Navy planes and from the battleship New Jersey, which flung 18-inch shells all the way from the Atlantic, Ocean; thanks also to Carter's National Guard and paratroops driving into the Swarm from their rear flank.

Thanks to the aces, who fought long into the night, fought on even after the Swarm hesitated in its onslaught, then began moving west, toward the distant Blue Mountains.

All night the Philadelphia airport was busy with transport bringing in another Marine division all the way from California.

The next morning the counterattack began.

After nightfall, the next day. A color television babbled earnestly from a corner of the departure lounge. Carter was getting ready to move his command post west to Allentown, and Modular Man had flown in with news of the latest Swarm movements. But Carter was busy right now, talking over the radio with his commanders in Kentucky, and so the android listened to news from the rest of the world.

Violence from Kentucky splashed across the screen. Images, taken from a safe distance through long lenses, jerked and snapped. In the midst of it was a tall man in fatigues without insignia, his body blazing like a golden star as he used a twenty-foot tree trunk to smash Swarm buds. There was an interview with him afterward: he looked no older than twenty, but his eyes had thousand-year ghosts in them. He didn't say much, made excuses, left to return to the war. Jack Braun, the Golden Boy of the forties and the Judas Ace of the fifties, back in action for the duration of the emergency.

More aces: Cyclone, Mistral's father, fighting the Swarm in Texas with the aid of his own personal camera crew, all armed with automatic weapons. The Swarm was in full retreat across the Mexican border, driven by armor from Forts Bliss and Hood, and by infantry from Fort Polk, the fliers decimated by widespread use of Vietnam-era defoliants. The Mexicans, slower to mobilize and with an army unprepared for modern large-scale warfare, weren't happy about the Swarm being pushed into Chihuahua and protested in vain.

More images, more locales, more bodies scattered across a torn landscape. Scenes from the autumn plains of northern Germany, where the Swarm had dropped right into the middle of a large-scale maneuver by the British Army of the Rhine, and where they had never even succeeded in concentrating. More troubled images from Thrace, where a Swarm onslaught was straddling the Greco-Turkish-Bulgarian border. The human governments weren't cooperating, and their people suffered.

Pictures of hope and prayer: scenes of Jerusalem and Bethlehem, already packed with Christmas pilgrims, now filling the churches in long, endless rounds of murmured prayer.

Stark black-and-white images from China, refugees and long columns of PLA troops marching. Fifty million dead were estimated. Africa, the Near East, South America-pictures of the Swarm advance across the third world, images of an endless wave of death. No continent was untouched save Australia. Help was promised as soon as the superpowers cleaned up their own backyards.

There were speculations about what was going on in the Eastern bloc: though no one was talking, it seemed as if the Swarm had landed in southern Poland, in the Ukraine, and in at least two places in Siberia. Pact forces had mobilized and were moving into battle. Commentators were predicting widespread starvation in Russia: the full-scale mobilization had taken the trucks and railways the civilian population used for the transportation of food.

Old pictures came on the screen: Mistral flying immune in the sky; Carter giving a subdued, reluctant press conference; the mayor of Philadelphia on the verge of hysteria… the android turned away. He'd seen too many of these images. And then he felt something move through him, some ghost wind that touched his cybernetic heart. He felt suddenly weaker. The television set hissed, its images gone. A rising babble came from the communications techs: some of their equipment had gone down. Modular Man was alarmed. Something was going on.

The ghost wind came again, touching his core. Time seemed to skip a beat. More communications down. The android moved toward Carter.

The general's hand trembled as he replaced his phone in its cradle. It was the first time the android had seen him frightened.

"That was electromagnetic pulse," Carter said. "Somebody's just gone nuclear, and I don't think it was us."

The papers still screamed invasion headlines. Children in the Midwest were being urged to avoid drinking milk: there was danger of poisoning from the airbursts the Soviets had used to smash the Siberian Swarms. Communications were still disrupted: the bombs had bounced enough radiation off the ionosphere to slag a lot of American computer chips.

People on the streets seemed furtive. There was a debate about whether New York should be blacked out or not, even though the Swarm was obviously on the run after six days of intensive combat.

Coleman Hubbard was too busy to care. He walked along Sixth Avenue, grinding his teeth, his head splitting with the effort his recent adventure had cost him.

He had failed. One of the more promising members of the Order, the boy Fabian, had been arrested on some stupid assault charge-the boy couldn't keep his hands off women, whether they were willing or not-and Hubbard had been sent to interview the police captain in charge. It wouldn't have required much, some lost paperwork perhaps, or a suggestion, implanted in the captain's head, that the evidence was insufficient… But the man's mind was slippery, and Hubbard hadn't been able to get ahold ou it. Finally Captain McPherson, snarling, had thrown him out. All Hubbard had done was to identify himself with Fabian's case, and perhaps cause the investigation to go further.

Lord Amun did not take failure well. His punishments could be savage. Hubbard rehearsed his defense in his mind. Then a rangy redheaded woman, wearing a proper executive Burberry, stepped into the street in front of Hubbard, almost ru

Anger stabbed into Hubbard. He hated rudeness.

And then his crooked smile began to spread across his face. He reached out with his mind, touching her thoughts, her consciousness. He sensed vulnerability there, an opening. The smile froze on his face as he summoned his power and struck.

The woman staggered as he seized control of her mind. Her case fell to the ground. He picked it up and took her elbow. "Here," he said. "You seem a little out of sorts."

She blinked at him. "What?" In her mind was only confusion. Gently, he soothed it.